Benji Hughes: A Singer for All Worldviews

Chuck Klosterman knew he was going to love A Love Extreme. And he was right.

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The relationship between the visual and the auditory isn't always important, but it's almost always interesting. You hear a voice on the radio and you wonder: What does this voice look like? I've done this my whole life, with varying degrees of success. Whitesnake looked the way Whitesnake sounded, but the Pixies did not look like people who made records by the Pixies. Two of the guys in Cheap Trick appeared the way I imagined, but the other two were weirdos. Christina Aguilera was too thin; Tori Amos wore too much makeup. Rose Tattoo and Earl Greyhound were both spot-on. Even after nearly three decades of MTV, we still tend to see musicians with our ears, which (I can only assume) is what the musicians would want. It validates the creative potential of their art — even if we've never peered into their eyes, it feels as if we have enough information to be able to recognize them at a bar.

I bring this up because I had the exact opposite experience with Benji Hughes, the only male singer-songwriter I've been obsessed with besides Linus of Hollywood. Before I heard a single note off his double-album debut, A Love Extreme, I saw the cover: It was Mr. Hughes, hyperbearded and wearing red sunglasses, quasi sleeping in windswept darkness. He looked a little fat, probably high, and completely consumed by his own self-generated genius. I had never heard his name before, but I already felt as if I knew everything about him. He looked like the kind of guy who used to work part-time at a bakery but could never get enough hours and the boss always wanted him to wear a shirt. I bet his friends don't believe that he loves disco music as much as he claims. He's nice to animals and waitresses. He sold his plasma for half a summer before moving in with his girlfriend for three months without paying rent, but she kicked him out after he almost fucked some thirty-seven-year-old female bartender who knew a lot about astrology and Paul McCartney's Wings. And then he made this record. The moment I saw the cover, I knew: I was going to love this music. I instinctively understood what it was supposed to do and how it was supposed to make me feel. And I was right.

A Love Extreme is twenty-five songs of pure, enthusiastic songwriting from a man who clearly does not care what I think about his work. It's an ambitious, solipsistic project. (In some respects, Hughes is akin to a Caucasian Cody Chesnutt crossed with a less catholic version of Ryan Adams.) But he's amazingly good at fitting every musical idea into whatever worldview is best suited to hold it. There's something effortless about his ability. It often seems as if Hughes can listen to any rival artist, immediately deduce what element defines the work, and then synthesize the vibe without seeming derivative. It's almost like A Love Extreme is a project: At various fleeting moments, he sings a little like Julian Casablancas, Joe Pernice, Leonard Cohen, Jarvis Cocker, Rivers Cuomo, Chet Baker, Mark Oliver Everett, and Mark Sandman.

Hughes makes a few dangerous brushes with joke rock on A Love Extreme, but he usually stays inside the foul pole; there's one great song about what happens when mummies get intoxicated. He seems autistically obsessed with April 17: He mentions a woman who shattered his heart at a Dairy Queen on that date in "You Stood Me Up," but another track cites April 17 as the evening of a memorable, unrelated Flaming Lips concert. He is, I suppose, a certain kind of boho romantic (assuming a preoccupation with failed relationships counts as "romantic"), and he understands how seemingly impractical details are inevitably the key to likable storytelling. When describing a woman's lips, he claims they taste like candy. What kind of candy, you ask? "Like really awesome candy," he says, specifying. Excellent! That's the type of candy I prefer, too.

It would be misleading to classify Hughes as "straightforward," because some of his material is meandering and a tad overlong. But there is something straightforward about his motives — it feels as if he came up with the core idea for this album twelve years ago but wasn't able to make it until now.